General Motors To Slash Outsourcing In IT Overhaul 232
gManZboy writes "GM's new CIO Randy Mott plans to bring nearly all IT work in-house as one piece of a sweeping IT overhaul. It's a high-risk strategy that's similar to what Mott drove at Hewlett-Packard. Today, about 90% of GM's IT services, from running data centers to writing applications, are provided by outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro, and only 10% are done by GM employees. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years--to 90% GM staff, 10% outsourcers. This will require a hiring binge. Mott's larger IT transformation plan doesn't emphasize budget cuts but centers on delivering more value from IT, much faster--at a time when the world's No. 2 automaker (Toyota is now No. 1) is still climbing out of bankruptcy protection and a $50 billion government bailout."
In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
Familiarity with how your business operates
Longer term institutional memory
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
Familiarity with how your business operates
Longer term institutional memory
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.
Smart, smart move by GM, who I do not often credit with making many. As a victim of outsourcing a couple times, I've seen how outsourcers operate - bring in the Crash team, of sharp, smart people, who gradually are rotated out to the next Crash site, while rotating in people with little to no experience who spend their days peering over the shoulders of others trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing (and once they have it figured out to some degree, they leave their employer for a wage they can actually live on.)
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:4, Interesting)
Truth. This happened to one of my employers. We ended up buying out of the contract.
Cost a major buttload plus screwed the company up for years.
Then they went on a re-engineering binge.
Put the final nail in the whole thing.
What a bunch of clowns running the thing. They got their ideas about IT from playing golf with other CEOs.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, I predict an "insourced" but "offshored" branch will be opening soon wherever labor is cheapest.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the downside to "professional" CEOs, people (MBAs) who train to be management and nothing else. Never worked in the company before, doesn't understand the business, but they sure can juggle the numbers as if the pieces of paper told the whole story.
Which ups my admiration for the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates of the world who pretty much built it from the ground up and is in there real nitty gritty, or even Warren Buffett, who at least learns what he buys from the inside out and usually leaves the functioning parts the fuck alone.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the downside to "professional" CEOs, people (MBAs) who train to be management and nothing else. Never worked in the company before, doesn't understand the business, but they sure can juggle the numbers as if the pieces of paper told the whole story.
Which ups my admiration for the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates of the world who pretty much built it from the ground up and is in there real nitty gritty, or even Warren Buffett, who at least learns what he buys from the inside out and usually leaves the functioning parts the fuck alone.
Actually, the problem is not the "numbers juggling". It is that they are incompetent at juggling numbers. The numbers, when looked at carefully, say that outsourcing for IT is a losing game and a huge risk in addition (except in a few rare cases). The problem is IMO, that the MBA types deep down know that they cannot do anything well and compensate by treating everybody as inferior. As IT people do not push back (they typically consider this game infantile and stupid, and rightfully so), they get plowed under. That means that first the good ones leave, refusing to play these stupid games, then the mediocre ones leave a bit later and finally only the duds remain.
The second effect I see is that the MBAs very keenly feel their inferiority to competent IT people and hence try to move them as far away as possible, best into other companies or even out of the country. Stupid, but all too human and what is bound to happen when you put big egos with little skill in charge.
I think what the MBAs really cannot get their head around to is that they are only support and help for those doing the actual work. They somehow think they are leaders and strategic thinkers, when in fact they are just bean-counters without any insight into the problems they are "managing". My impression is that that the MBA is fundamentally flawed insofar as MBAs are being taught that they are more important than those understanding the actual problems. Possibly an effect of all the competing MBA programs stemming from marketing, i.e. the "Do an MBA with us and you will be a highly respected leader". That is the wrong approach and cannot work well.
On the plus side, there is a (still small) counter-movement: Evidence-Based Management. Of course the MBAs are not equipped emotionally and intellectually to practice that, so it will be a long and bloody battle. But without it we will see enterprises fail because their IT has become too dysfunctional.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a deeper side to this. Back when EDS was still EDS, they were doing a pretty good job for GM. The problem is, HP bought them, and started to apply the same goals/metrics to the services side (formerly EDS) that they use for the product side (that was losing money, and makes fucking printers in the first place). Side note: here is where my self-control keeps me from using terms like "fucking incompetent faggots" and "galactic assclowns" to describe the piss-chugging buttmonkeys that displaced EDS' leadership. As a result, the quality of service that GM got dropped...and the value proposition of outsourcing went with it.
Now, in all fairness, the fact that HP's leadership couldn't figure out how to get wet if they were dropped in the middle of the ocean is probably only part of the problem. Their ass-pounding mediocrity is probably also compounded by the current political situation and the drive to bring jobs back to the USA. So it's not entirely the fault of a bunch of circle-jerking sycophantic pole-chain-smokers. Just 99.99% their fault.
Guess who I used to work for before I quit? :)
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure why you defend EDS - massive mismanagement caused multiple contracts to be lost (for instance, OnSTAR), shedding massive amounts of jobs (I survived all 5 waves of layoffs, including the huge one in October 2001 [30%]), then they spun off nearly everything profitable to keep their stock from going junk. They had TWO profitable divisions (of 9) when my group was spun off, and they spun off the other profitable group shortly after. I don't know if any of the last 7 became profitable before the HP pur
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:4, Insightful)
And guess who Carly Fiorina advises these days....the Republican Party. Saw her on some talking heads pundit show recently, she's just as clueless now as back then. The dumbest bit is that she thinks she's somehow understands how the private sector works well. And Hurd is now working for Oracle. HP has got to stop inflicting their failures on the rest of the country.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Informative)
> Smart, smart move by GM, who I do not often credit with making many.
Don't forget the history here. GM used to own EDS, and it pretty much functioned as their internal IT org.
And I had many friends look them over, even going so far as to interview, just to test the waters. They'd pay high, but you had to shave all facial hair off and dress exactly as their code dictated. After a probationary period they cut those they didn't see fitting in - which meant you ended up with a bunch of conformists who wouldn't take a risk, by pointing out something may not have been a good idea or there was a weakness in a plan somewhere. Good ol' Ross Perot - run a company like the army.
Re: (Score:2)
The last time I worked with people from EDS, they were totally flummoxed by a DNS change. There were 2 servers with identical content. All that needed to happen was change the A record and be happy, but they were SURE the new server couldn't be brought up for production AT ALL until the DNS change was fully propagated Naturally this meant unnecessary downtime.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
And like some people keep trying to drill into other peoples' heads here, business isn't about facial haired, espresso swilling ping pong playing computer hackers coming up with gee wiz bang frameworks. Business is in business to make money. GM isn't a software company. They want reliable un-sexy computer systems that help them get business done. Hiring highly individual IT people who tend to do things like drop new code bases on production servers without telling people because they read a cool article on some web site isn't what they want. They want people who can write code good enough to let them do business. And that is easily maintainable (something that using flavour of the day frameworks that will disappear quickly and will puzzle the hell out of people who have to program this weird shit 15 years from now). GM is not a software company. Sure they need to create some system software, but the majority will be bought and then maintained in house.
Re: (Score:3)
This hasn't been true for about 2 decades. I worked for EDS...and interviewed with a goatee, having ridden a motorcycle there (I had the jacket with me as well as the helmet). They didn't notice the piercing until later, but that didn't get me fired and I didn't need to remove it. The days of extreme conformity went out the door back in the early 90s...and at the beginning of EDS, they made sense. For one thing, people normally wore business suits in the first place, and there were no purple suits as we
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:4, Interesting)
... They'd pay high, but you had to shave all facial hair off and dress exactly as their code dictated. After a probationary period they cut those they didn't see fitting in - which meant you ended up with a bunch of conformists who wouldn't take a risk, by pointing out something may not have been a good idea or there was a weakness in a plan somewhere. Good ol' Ross Perot - run a company like the army.
I was working in a mechanical test lab (as a frequent guest) when EDS first appeared at GM -- mid 1980's. A bunch of idiots with brush cuts tried to take over the engineering computing as well as the business computing. Went around putting EDS stickers on anything that looked like a computer. What a disaster, took a year or more to throw them out and get the dedicated real-time control systems back working properly. This may explain (in part) why GM's car engineering got such a bad reputation back then. Plenty of smart GM employees that were not able to do their job.
Re: (Score:3)
Who wants to come work for my IT managed services company? 3 out of the 4 owners have beards, and a different subset of 3 have open tattoos. One shaves his entire head. They've all BTDT in the field, too. The 'best' IT guys we work with (or rather, work for us) are of a similar mold: straight talking, take-no-prisoners (or bullshit) types who are actually quite reasonable individuals. Yes, there is a high per capita of motorcycles other impractical vehicles at the company, but that's kinda a price you pay f
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
"which meant you ended up with a bunch of conformists who wouldn't take a risk, "
You have no idea how accurate this statement is. I worked for GM in the early 90's and managers got promoted for mantaining the status quo. Anyone who innovated or made waves ws marginalized. Can't believe it's still the same old story 20 years later!
Ross Perot said the same thing.
I also know they thrived on paper. Great stacks of it. I've had to work with EDS people on a couple of things and could not believe the amount of stupid, useless documentation involved in the least little project. I swear they must have regiments who do nothing but compose documents. ISO 9001 never meant that level of crap.
Re: (Score:2)
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
Not that I disagree at all (or want to), but a citation or two on this would be good to have around if anyone has 'em.
Re: (Score:3)
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
Not that I disagree at all (or want to), but a citation or two on this would be good to have around if anyone has 'em.
I'm sure HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro can provide plenty of citations showing the opposite.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting A/C because I'm still working at HP...
Mott was the king of cost cuts. When I started at HP in 2001, HP IT was awesome -- call a number, get an American tech who had a clue. They would even come to your desk, if necessary. Mott "transformed" IT by:
-Laying off lots of IT workers
-Forcing most of the remaining IT workers to move to a single location in Texas, or be fired. No telecommuting allowed
-Making it impossible to purchase any software not on a short "approved" list. Even if it was $20
-Requiring almost all IT issues to be entered into a web-based ticket system -- an overloaded system that was often slow or down
-Limiting telephone support to nearly nothing. Login screens directed employees to "use a co-workers PC to enter a ticket"
-Requiring users to categorize their own tickets. However, the categories were impossible to decipher and I estimate well over 50% of tickets were mis-categorized. Further, mis-categorized tickets were summarily closed as "Resolved" with no hint on what the correct category might be. Further, even if you categorized your ticket correctly, but the level 1 tech didn't find your issue in his checklist, your ticket was closed as "Resolved" -- even though they had NOT resolved your issue.
-Eliminated desk-side support, forcing 6-figure engineers and managers to do time-consuming IT tasks such as re-imaging rather than paying less expensive IT staff to do the same thing. Further, for hardware failures they shipped you a new PC via UPS/FedEx so you had no working PC for several business days.
I'm sure all these things saved a ton of money -- for IT. However, it cost the various other HP business units giant wads of money in lost productivity. Since the productivity didn't show up on IT's cost sheet, it didn't matter to Mott.
Re: (Score:2)
perhaps he was told that he either cut the IT costs by X amount of money or outsource it all.
Re: (Score:3)
This is a metrics problem. Management typically has to perform versus metrics and if the metrics are shit, the product will be shit as well. "cut IT costs" is a terrible metric by itself given that IT is pervasive to the functionality of a modern corporation.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
This is far to general a point to prove using studies. Basically, no study can get around the fact that the choice of whether or not to outsource is highly influenced by existing conditions in the company, which in turn are correlated with the outcomes the study is trying to measure.
So basically we have MBA types (who are biased towards the fashion of the day), vs IT types (who are biased towards whatever they perceive as maximizing the demand for IT employees). IT professionals, like all people, develop
Re: (Score:2)
lol
Re: (Score:3)
Weird, I've worked in lots of enterprises over the years, and largely, I've found that the real techs prefer automation (we're not paid for what we've already done, we're paid for what we do next).
Automation is the only way to get time to do what needs doing next. Unless, of course, your basement is the infrastructure you're running.
Re: (Score:3)
Why should IT be treated any differently than any other division of the company? Employees in all departments do this, because businesses in the USA don't give raises (of any consequence) or improve working conditions to the point at which the employee WANTS to stay. Just like IT, employees in other departments gain experience and skills that t
Re: (Score:2)
- The best and brightest of the contractors are quickly promoted to bigger and better things... at a different company. There's your loss of insitutional memory.
- It turns out to be almost impossible to hire and/or nurture employees for these positions, and even har
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
Another big advantage: No middle-men.
The way that IBM makes money managing GM's IT infrastructure is to pay their people less than GM paid IBM, say 25% less. So if you're GM, you can go to the guys who are currently doing your work and getting a paycheck from IBM, and say "Hey, how would you like a 15% raise to work for us doing the same job you've been doing all along?", get a lot of people to say "Great deal!", and you've just gotten a 10% cost savings.
Re:In-house staff do have advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You were already paying for those overheads when the contractor was standing in-between.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also... you get to talk and work with your actual users.
You get immediate feedback, even directly between developer and user.
This interaction creates new business rules that stay in house that could put you ahead of your competitors.
If you are in control of your IT you are not at the whim of your contractors, no rush to upgrade to the latest version, you get to understand what gets more priority in your IT assets.
Lots of benefits if your business depends on having IT running your business and giving you "bu
Re: (Score:2)
Less overhead and less sub contractors.
Also easier to have people work overtime as some contractors don't want to pay overtime.
It's how you want to go when you are large (Score:5, Insightful)
You only outsource general functions like IT, payroll, maintenance and so on when you are small enough that it makes economic sense to do so. When the amount and kind of service you need is such that it would cost more to employ people in house than to outsource it, you do. However when you get large, it is silly to outsource. You can get it cheaper in house since you are large enough to need the equivalent of many full time people working for you, and if they are outsourced it is just another layer of cost.
A small business of 5 people? Ya you probably want to outsource IT needs (and other stuff). It would be infeasible to hire an IT person and have 17% of your staff be IT. A company of twenty thousand people? Don't outsource it, you will need a hundred plus IT people anyhow, might as well have them work directly for you.
Re: (Score:3)
When the amount and kind of service you need is such that it would cost more to employ people in house than to outsource it, you do. However when you get large, it is silly to outsource.
Many very large companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google included) outsource some of their IT work to increase flexibility. Implementing a new Oracle/SAP module? Hire proficient folks on-demand, and manage them with internal employees. Of course, doing this kind of work requires a lot of proficiency as you need to prevent contractor and subs from gaming the system, but with a large enough scale it can be economical and provide strategic agility.
That said, I'm glad GM is doing what is likely the right thing - c
Re:It's how you want to go when you are large (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Here's another advantage: your internal IT organization doesnt skim a 20 - 30% profit off the top.
Seriously, proponents of strategies like outsourcing and privatization always talk about how these companies increase efficiency. But, since they always have a profit motive, these companies must operate (say) 30% more efficiently just to break even.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, I would have thought it the other way, the client specifies what it wants to outsource, and the outsource company supplies that, at a 20%-30% saving, whilst taking on the clients IT.
Now, when the client wants, say for example, a new network point put in as offices are being moved, then this is an addition, the outsource company will charge at least 6 x the price that it would take normally, whilst using a contractor to do the work.
Also, that new employee needs a new computer? Look at £800 for a
Re: (Score:2)
In theory there are lots of advantages, but most of them are negated by one thing - they know they're a monopoly and act like it, unless they're in immediate fear of being outsourced. Most IT departments work so that when nothing is wrong they don't get much praise but when shit hits the fan they're the one taking it so most of them become notoriously conservative. The people that raise to the top are those who haven't caused any shit storms, breeding more conservatism. So yes good response time, but not if
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck with that. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That article is nearly three years old, and bases it's conclusion on GM missing the "green wave". They've since introduced the Volt, among other fuel-efficient models. If the author's base assumption had been borne out, if GM had stuck their heads in the ground and continued to churn out Hummers, then he probably would have been right. But as it stands, I doubt even the author still stands by that article.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Does anyone really believe that the tens of billions of dollars that the govt gave to GM actually fixed the problem? Their cost's are still too high relative to the competition. and there are a lot of people that will never purchase another GM product while the Govt has any stake in the company. I was only half kidding about the 3 years. Europe is heading into another recession (or worse). China is slowing down and the US economy stinks (and may get a lot worse if things in the rest of the world go to shit.) An IT re-org is nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs.
I gave up buying GM products a long time ago despite my family being diehard Cadillac and Oldsmobile owners when I was growing up. Frankly, it was all about quality, long before gubmint had a stake in the company. They have probably fixed the quality problem by now, but I'll never find out. There have been one or two cars they've made in the last twenty years that I was a bit interested in, but never enough to give up my American made Toyotas and Hondas.
And despite me not buying their cars, GM still manages
because there a lot of IT people who... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are absolutely correct, as long as you see IT as any other department. If the Janitorial dept., IT dept and Facilites dept are all the same, then you will be insane if you wouldn't outsource IT !!!
It's just computers and stuff, even a monkey can do it...
Not at all (Score:2)
Just about time (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced.
We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again.
Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
Re: (Score:2)
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced.
We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again.
Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
This would be part of the 50Billion dollar bailout to increase the number of H1B workers since there are no longer enough trained IT workers in the U.S. Then the Govt (insert your political party here) can claim that they created "X" amount of jobs, even if they go to H1B workers.
Re:Just about time (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a large electric utility in IT. We had to submit competitive bids against private companies to provide IT service. We usually were under bid and the IT contract was awarded to an outside company. Usually the service the utility received from the IT people they hired was good at first but soon the response started to slow. Now, when you have customers coming in the front door trying to pay bills and the customer service rep's computer is down, that is the worst of the worst scenarios. I makes an unhappy customer and no way to easily collect payment from the customer. Five or more customer service reps without the tools to do their job is not good. A few times like this while having to wait for the contract IT guys to show up, usually underscores to management the value of having in house people who are able to respond immediately. So like someone said, it went in cycles. In house - contract - in house - etc. They figure when times get tough that they'll take the savings, until the service just gets too bad and the the multivibrator of management flips again.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me this would improve the jobs numbers slightly and play to team Obama's "Romney was an outsourcer" campaign rhetoric. So, I'd shorten the back-to-looking-for-work interval to post November of this year, depending on the election outcome. It's similar to how right after the WI recall failed that the President was speaking about hiring more firemen and teachers, both are union strongholds and could push against the right-to-work movement. The timing is incredibly convenient.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't read TFA. Does it say they are going to hire in the US? The multi-national I work for has some local IT staff in the US offices (mostly related to the hardware infrastructure we require for operations), but traditional help-desk support is out of India.
Re: (Score:2)
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced.
We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again.
Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
It's not often that I get to play the role of optimist, but this is one of them.
Oh, I've no doubt that in 5 years Corporate America will cook up some new fad to once again make employment a misery.
But face it - outsourcing, offshoring was about the bottom of the bucket. I mean yes, they said it could get worse - when India got too expensive the outsourcing would head to Africa, but most of the parts of Africa that have the resources to outsource are probably more expensive than India, and the ones that don'
Re: (Score:2)
Development has been outsourced more than 5 years. The big organizations also have a tendency to outsource to more than one contractor or consulting service to work on the same project which means trying to get these organizations to work together and that is a gigantic pain in the ass. Especially if the outsourced developers work for competing consulting or contracting firms. Add the fact that most companies are discovering you get what you pay for when outsourcing internationally where developer salaries
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think the reason you can't get a job is mainly because you're a whiny little bitch who blames everybody but themselves.
more like 7th largest automaker! (Score:2)
Not sure how you are measuring size but:
"Volkswagen has retained its place as the number one car company in the world, according to the Forbes Global 2000 companies survey."
"US poster boy General Motors came in seventh position among the car makers"
Forbes’ top car makers for 2012
Volkswagen – 17
Toyota – 25
Daimler – 37
Ford – 44
Honda – 59
BMW – 61
General Motors – 63
Re: (Score:3)
Pretty sure they were using by volume. Possibly the 2010 numbers [wikipedia.org]
Re:more like 7th largest automaker! (Score:4, Informative)
Uh...: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#Top_vehicle_manufacturing_groups_.3Cby_volume.3E [wikipedia.org] (which does put Toyota #1 and GM #2)
If you had bothered to read the article you copy-pasted that from, "Volkswagen has retained its place as the number one car company in the world, according to the Forbes Global 2000 companies survey.
The report ranks the world’s biggest companies across an equal weighting of sales, profits, assets and market value. The result is a company ranking in order of size, with 66 countries represented in the mix." (http://news.drive.com.au/drive/motor-news/rankings-worlds-biggest-car-companies-20120420-1xc14.html)
Think of the brands VW owns versus the brands that GM owns.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My biggest gripe with GM was how my car, once 25 miles over the Power Train Warranty was abandoned by the automaker when a headbolt broke. Why did it break? You couldn't reve the engine past 5,000 rpm! They're attitude was 'Normal Wear and Tear' that was at 30,025 miles. I'm still irked about it. I hope they are a lot smarter automaker by now, you are only as good as how well you stand behind your product - and if it's got problems you fix them, you do not run away from them!
Re: (Score:3)
Ted Nelson, Customer: Go on, I'm listening.
Tommy: Here's the way I see it, Ted. Guy puts a fancy guarantee on a box 'cause he wants you to feel all warm and toasty inside.
Ted Nelson, Customer: Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy: 'Course it does. Why shouldn't it? Ya figure you put that little box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter, am I right, Te
Re: (Score:2)
Re:more like 7th largest automaker! (Score:5, Informative)
No they're not. VW are crushing everybody at the moment, in terms of units sold:
http://www.economist.com/node/21558269 [economist.com]
Slash Outsourcing (Score:5, Funny)
I presume that Slash Outsourcing is Slashdot's latest unwanted "channel" to go with that Business Intelligence nonsense?
Design Flaw? (Score:2)
From the article, "Data center consolidation: GM plans to go from 23 sizable data centers worldwide to just two, both in Michigan. "
Note the locations, or should I say location. Is Michigan so big you can get physical diversity?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. Michigan is enormous. It's farther from the Detroit to the straits of Macinac than it is from Detroit to New York City, and the straits are only a little over halfway to the border.
It also has an unusually high-reliability power grid. (It had to be designed for some severe storms and icing.) During the great northeast blackout the problem propagated to the Detroit Windsor boundary, Detroit Edison's equipment detected it, and cut off from the east coast. Pick a spot (like the west side of Ann Arbor
Re:Design Flaw? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's start with all the stuff you missed:
-As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border. )
-Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side
-During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down. The cutoff was where the grids switched over in either Flint of Jackson. We were back online a little faster than most places, but we were down for 24+ hours.
Re: (Score:2)
Michigan is enormous. It's farther from the Detroit to the straits of Macinac than it is from Detroit to New York City, and the straits are only a little over halfway to the border
Huh?
Just measured (with Google Maps): Straight-line distance from Detroit to the strait is ~255 miles, driving distance is ~288 miles. Straight-line distance from Detroit to New York City is ~480 miles, driving distance is ~614 miles.
New York City is roughly twice as far from Detroit as the Strait of Mackinac.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Michigan is enormous.
Born n' raised in Michigan, living in Texas.
MI is a lot of things, but enormous it ain't.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Detroit did lose power and is DTE, but I know it didn't hit Grand Rapids which is not DTE. Ann Arbor is still on DTE and I believe power was lost there.
You can see the areas DTE services on their outage map.
http://dteenergy.com/map/outage.html/ [dteenergy.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, Detroit to the Mackinac City near the tip of the lower peninsula is 298 mi. Detroit to New York, NY is 614 mi if you go through Philly. However, Detroit to Copper Harbor which is the northern tip of the upper peninsula is 605 mi.
But, yes Michigan is huge if you actually count both peninsulas. There just isn't much developed if you go really far north. Ann Arbor, Flint, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo would all work well as areas for data centers. I know Ann Arbor, and Flint already have at least on
Re:Design Flaw? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow! (Score:2)
Given that this is GM, this might set off a few ideas in MBA-land that will be beneficial to IT at large. A huge company bringing IT back in house? Amazing how things come back around... kind of like the cloud.
I actually work for a service provider (not doing hands-on support but engineering work for customer projects.) If you are absolutely, completely not dependent on IT, or too small to have your own IT department, outsourcing is one way to go. Big companies I've been at that outsourced IT have almost al
Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking specifically about the MyVolt site. Ok, it's mostly a bunch of ads and info on the Volt - obviously mainly motivated by brain-dead marketing, since it's also the main place owners go to check their car's status.
So, you push the log in button. Though there's room on the page, oh no, we have to pop up a window to log in on - meanwhile, the animations on the page behind are still loading and running blocking code that makes my other web apps stutter. After maybe 10 seconds, you get the log on window, with it all filled in (thanks firefox) and click the log in button....and you wait, and wait, and wait. Meanwhile, the button you clicked doesn't grey or disable, and clicking it again breaks it. Finally, you're logged in and it starts trying to talk to the car to see what the state of charge is for you. This takes at least two minutes, often ending in "we failed to contact the car, try again?". During those two minutes, it's busy drawing an animation of the state of charge, in blocking code, so my other realtime (stock trading and TV) apps stutter. And, if there was already valid info on the SOC meter, it gets wiped up while you are waiting. It can take over 5 minutes to find out state of charge on this app! Every single page element is reloaded from scratch and re-initialized in response to every single user action, often wiping out valuable data you had already showing each time. And yes, it logs you out every 30 min - during which time you may or may not have gotten the data you wanted. This site must hit 5-6 different (all slow) servers for each redraw. It's obviously done by drag-drop-monkey tools by someone who doesn't even know how to do that, plus a lot of pretty but useless art from some marketing idiot - owners don't need to see more crappy ads for something they already own (are you listening too, Amazon?).
Anything, and I mean even a site writen by a 13 year old retard who was the nephew of a GM exec would be superior. Thank god, the Volt runs linux in a cluster...that was done mostly inhouse and by IBM, who at least have a clue.
two thumbs up :) (Score:2)
Wal-Mart doesn't outsource their IT (Score:5, Interesting)
And they are the king of cost-cutting. They outsource many other things, but still insist on keeping their IT in-house.
Re:Wal-Mart doesn't outsource their IT (Score:5, Interesting)
+1
Wall Mart is the case study for Business Intelligence, Data warehousing, Data Mining, etc... They analyze every little trend in their inventory, sales, customer traffic, etc.
I remember reading one time they placed beer next to diapers during the week at night because that's was when young dads make a quick run to restock, coming out with diapers in one arm and a six pack on the other.
There is no way you can outsource that and remain competitive.
Re:Wal-Mart doesn't outsource their IT (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh and this too...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ [forbes.com]
Re: (Score:2)
So does Starbucks - but according to a friend (who works as a DBMS manager for their business intelligence/analysis division) that has more to do with keeping the data under tight wraps.
It's not always about cost cutting or rapid turnaround or whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
Having worked with them extensively I think they actually need a bit more outsourcing. In many areas they are way behind mostly due to an excess of "not invented here" and a lack of employees with extensive experience elsewhere. Their managers are primarily lifetime Walmart employees who grew up with the company. Another big chunk of their IT workforce were hired straight out of college and have no perspective on how the rest of the world does IT.
That is what college CS for IT get's you (Score:2)
That is what college CS for IT get's you people with no perspective on how the rest of the world does IT.
Where a tech school or even community colleges get's you teacher who have done / are still doing real IT work in the field.
Not high-risk at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Not risky when you own the politicians. (Score:2)
Seriously if they screw this up they just get another bailout. It's a win win for them.
Re: (Score:2)
I've used that handle for about 25 years. So a 14 year old version of myself thought it was cool and I've kept it since it usually isn't taken and I'm a bit nostalgic for it.
Almost coder. BS Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Computer Science for fun.
Choose what you outsource (Score:3)
I have a simple rule:
Out-source monkey work. If it's something you can write instructions for that're sufficiently clear and detailed that a moderately-housebroken monkey can follow them successfully, it's a candidate for outsourcing.
In-source anything requiring intelligence, business knowledge or judgement. If you're depending on the people doing the job to know what they're doing and do it well then you want people that you have control over, you don't want people who answer to someone else. To find out who they answer to, ask one question: "Who signs their paycheck?". That's who they answer to.
Regardless of the above, in-source anything where a failure will cause a business interruption. If it's going to stop your business from operating if it's not working right, you want the people responsible for it under your control and answering to you. That way you can decide whether it's worth the overtime to keep them in until it's fixed. You do not want that decision left in the hands of someone whose business isn't being impacted by the problem and who won't suffer if the problem continues.
Re: (Score:2)
Would I be correct in summarizing that as if you shouldn't be doing it or it doesn't matter, outsource it, otherwise insource it?
I have seen outsourcing success in short term projects... in the telecom world if you're doing a forklift upgrade of a PBX, either you don't have enough people or you have way too many full timers (or you've only got like 50 phones... I'm talking about 1000+ phone offices).
Also I've seen outsourced cabling work go pretty well. Horrifically expensive compared to insourcing to a no
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd disagree. I think it's more a question of whether it's a commodity skillset or not. For instance, janitorial work, or cable pulling. Both are commodities: the work's the same no matter who it's being done for. One's long-term while the other's a one-time project, but in both cases you're probably better off contracting the work out.
OTOH, a database conversion's going to require specific skills and is likely a one-time thing, but you're well advised to have at least the top people running it be your own
Think About It (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure you would... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
well outsourcing IT drives shadow IT and other stuff. At least with in house IT you can easily put IT people any where with BS like NO you can't move X person there as that area or Region is under a differnt sub.
With centralized IT you can still have people who are put on X department.
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest thing working against them, I think, is that working for GM usually means living in Detroit.
Nobody lives in Detroit anymore. Well, very few people working white collar jobs, including auto industry workers. They all moved out into the surrounding areas like Royal Oak, Grosse Pointe, Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Troy, etc.
Detroit is left to the very poor and the hipster kids into urban farming and Bankse.